Trump Proposes Trillion Dollar Defense Budget

June 2025
By Xiaodon Liang

U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed the first ever $1 trillion defense budget, but his administration’s plan to reach that total has left some congressional defense leaders dissatisfied.

On May 2, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the Trump administration’s budget request for fiscal year 2026. The budget plan, presented in an abbreviated preliminary form, includes a base defense request of $892.6 billion, plus a $119.3 billion allocation of additional resources from the Republican-controlled Congress’ budget reconciliation bill

That bill, which includes $150 billion in additional defense spending over the next four fiscal years, remains the subject of intense negotiations between factions of the Republican Party. If those negotiations fail and the additional funds are not made available, the overall defense budget request will remain flat compared with the final amount appropriated by Congress for fiscal 2025. (See ACT, April 2025.)

The “reconciliation bill was always meant to change fundamentally the direction of the Pentagon … not to paper over OMB’s intent to shred to the bone our military capabilities and our support to service members,” said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a May 2 press statement.

The House Armed Services Committee approved its portion of the reconciliation bill April 29, distributing the $150 billion in additional defense spending across several priorities. These include nuclear forces, which would receive an additional $12.9 billion, and integrated air and missile defense, which would receive $24.7 billion. The administration is yet to provide detailed information on how the base defense budget would be allocated.

“Gifting the Pentagon an additional $150 billion with little to no guard rails, on top of the nearly $900 billion defense budget already passed and without any budget plan from the President for Fiscal Year 2026 or even execution instructions for FY25, defies basic common sense,” said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the committee, in an Apr. 27 statement.

Within the nuclear forces budget, the House committee would allocate an additional $1.5 billion for “risk reduction” activities of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program. Technological maturation and risk reduction (TMRR) is a phase of the R&D process that precedes engineering and manufacturing development (EMD). Following last year’s Nunn-McCurdy review of the Sentinel, the Defense Department rescinded the ICBM program’s authorization to proceed from TMRR to EMD.

The House committee bill also would provide $500 million for improvements to the Minuteman III ICBM. The Air Force is considering plans to keep that missile in service through 2050, Bloomberg News reported March 27.

The nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missile program, which was opposed by the Biden administration but nevertheless funded by Congress in fiscal 2025, would receive $2 billion. A further $400 million would be made available for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s work on the new missile’s warhead.

The bill also would earmark $62 million to reopen missile tubes aboard the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines. Those tubes were sealed as part of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is set to expire after Feb. 5, 2026.

The House bill would provide $4.5 billion for accelerated production of the B-21 bomber. (See ACT, May 2025.)

Although the Trump administration has released few details about the Golden Dome missile defense architecture, the House bill would provide $5.6 billion to develop “space-based and boost phase intercept capabilities.” An amendment introduced by Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-Va.) to strip $2.6 billion in funding from the program failed on a party-line vote.

The House proposal to increase spending on nuclear programs comes days after the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released the newest edition of a biannual estimate of the cost of U.S. nuclear forces. The CBO now calculates that the United States will spend $946 billion over the next decade—2025 to 2034—on nuclear modernization, operations, and sustainment.

The CBO approach to calculating total nuclear spending tabulates programmatic costs as published in presidential budget requests; extrapolates those costs over 10 years using public information about each program; and then adds an estimate of expected cost growth based on historical programs. The report noted $817 billion in programmatic spending over the next decade, with a further $129 billion in likely cost growth.

Thirty-eight percent of the nuclear spending will be taken up by the modernization of delivery systems within the Defense Department, while another 9 percent is attributable to expansion of the Department of Energy’s weapons complex.

Ten percent will go toward modernization of nuclear command and control systems, while the remainder—roughly 
44 percent—pays for ongoing operations and sustainment.

CBO estimates that nuclear forces will account for 11.8 percent of the Defense Department’s total acquisition costs over the 10-year period, peaking at 13.2 percent in 2031.

Notably, however, the CBO estimates do not include cost overruns for the Sentinel ICBM that were publicized after the fiscal 2025 presidential budget request was released. The CBO estimate therefore excludes the cost implications of the Nunn-McCurdy review conclusion that the ICBM is expected to cost 81 percent more than a baseline of $77.8 billion in 2020 dollars. Instead, it assumes that the program is 37 percent over baseline, as the Defense Department informed Congress in late 2023. (See ACT, September 2024.)